linnposts.com

“White evangelicals heartily endorse a crook and a rapist apparently because they expect that he will put in place the world they envision, one controlled by white, patriarchal evangelical Christians.” 

That’s what historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote after the Iowa Republican caucus meetings a week ago. I’m sure she would say the same for white evangelicals in New Hampshire and, for that matter, all around the country.

To be fair, though, I prefer to call these voters “political evangelicals” because not all evangelicals are Trump supporters, mainly the ones who believe being a Republican and being Christian are one and the same.

That said, less a criticism than an accurate description of what white political evangelical Iowans showed about themselves, Richardson’s assessment speaks to a corrupted expression of Christianity that dominates American evangelicalism the way it dominates the Republican Party.

It is only natural for anyone who takes genuine Christian values seriously (love, justice, compassion, and the like) to be upset and angry at what political evangelicals are doing.

My personal response is sadness.

I cannot help but wonder what message they are hearing in church that prevents them from seeing the raw hypocrisy of being Donald Trump’s base of support.

It is nothing short of stunning that they support a man who is the personification of everything the Christian message says Christians should not be and everything Christians should not do.

Political evangelicals don’t deny that Trump is terrible man. They simply ignore it. That’s what makes their support of him so hypocritical.

The short definition of hypocrisy is “pretense.” The long one is “the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform.”

The definitions leave no room for equivocation. Pretense is always pretense, phony moral standards are always phony. The only way political evangelicals can overcome the image they have of being hypocrites is to stop being one.

At this point they have shown no desire to do so. Instead, not bothered by Trump using them as pawns on his political chess board, they try to justify themselves in at least two primary ways.

One is the claim that God uses bad people to do good things. Translated into plain English, they are blaming God for their hypocrisy. Wow! Not sure that’s a good position for people who believe in hell to take. Nonetheless, that’s what they say.

The second way is that they believe Democrats are not Christians and, thus, the only way to have Christians in charge of the government is to elect Republicans, no matter who (or what) they are.  

Really? That may be more preposterous than blaming God. People who are guilty of blatant hypocrisy want the rest of us to believe they should be running our government, they should hold political power, that they will do what is right in the decisions they make.

As the old adage goes, I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid. Apparently, political evangelicals think I am, think you are.

If Speaker of House, Mike Johnson, who Liz Cheney documents in her book as having no hesitation in telling lies when it serves his purposes, is an example of the kind of leader political evangelicals want for the nation, that’s all the rest of us need to know.

It all comes down to this. The only thing more outrageous than Trump himself wanting to be president again are political evangelicals who believe God also wants him to be. (I feel like throwing-up as I write those words.)

The hypocrisy of political evangelicals is indisputable proof that the harm done by a corrupted version of Christianity throughout history is at work again.

Put simply, then, just like Trump, political evangelicals are very bad for the country politically and cause for deep sadness for all of us who care about the integrity of Christianity.